They got done by one of their own contractors who had a bunch of conduct complaints. Maybe they shouldn't have outsourced that particular piece of government work?
I lived very close to there last year. The motivation is clear. People in that part of the world are armed and hate everything. Literally all they do is stockpile ammo and wait “for the fall of society”.
I know I sound hyperbolic, but I’ve met lots of them. It’s part of why I left. They want to establish a white conservative mob rule.
People probably think you’re just exaggerating, but no. This is a very common personality for rural white men to have. It’s their “protect my kin” fantasy of the government and minorities cresting the horizon coming to take their freedom away so they can go out in a blaze of glory.
In reality, most of them wouldn’t be able to get a shot off before they knew what was happening.
Most of them can't walk a mile much less mount an actual assault. I live in somewhat rural NC and the majority of this vocal minority are out of shape nobodies that live in very strange echo chambers.
Guy put all his points into INT but WIS was his dump stat. Might just be one of those nerds who got too comfortable taking his work home with him after getting away with things for a while and kept escalating the bad behavior, good thing the contractor was paying attention and reported the suspicions. Hopefully this will lead to more effective oversight when it comes to sensitive items.
Florida is in for a rough time, in the next ten years will have a massive shortage of medical workers, teachers, and professionals. It will be the most uneducated state in the western hemisphere and likely a major center of criminal activity.
Not to worry. The real estate market will prop up their econo… wait…. Oh. Um. At least they have good tourism because of Disn…. Huh. Ummmm… they can go swimming in the FL keys! The hot tub ocean temps will feel good till you want to cool off.
They’re also loosing agricultural and construction workers as DeSantis’s anti-immigration policies drives away illegal migrants who filled those positions in under-the-table jobs.
One of my kids is a sophomore in high school (we live in FL unfortunately), she wants to be a vet but we will probably be looking to other states to send her to college. Political climate down here is ridiculous right now.
In ten years I could see all three having very low education rates. Alabama will still have college graduates though, Florida might lose it’s colleges.
The people who matter to the Florida Fascists all have investments in other states and countries. They aren’t dependent on the local economy prospering; and they benefit from keeping state and local taxes low.
They can import doctors and other skilled laborers from overseas. Then by eliminating birthright citizenship and restricting naturalization, they can ensure that those skilled laborers’ children will not become citizens. Uppity immigrants will be stuffed in a box and mailed to California.
By destroying public education, they ensure that those skilled laborers (and everyone else) must pay far-right private schools to educate their children. Only far-right schools and teachers will be permitted to operate; all others will be prosecuted as “groomers” and/or just lynched by outraged “mothers’ groups”.
Crime is very good for fascists; it keeps rich people scared of poor people, and thus willing to support politicized-militarized police violence, private militias, etc.
The goal is to replicate a fascist social structure, which is a parody of a traditional conservative social structure — with the aristocracy replaced by the loyal Party elite; church replaced with Party rallies; and multigenerational family replaced with atomized nuclear families whose man-of-the-house must be tested for Party loyalty. These all stand above the racial underclass — who do the doctoring, landscaping, and cocaine importing, and who don’t get to do things like vote, question the police, or get their rape kits tested.
Being a trad dad isn’t enough, men; if you tolerate political dissent among your children, they will be taken away from you and given to a Party-loyal abuser. Today it’s your trans kid; tomorrow it’s your teenager who’s a Greta Thunberg fan. Permitting your daughter to attend an illegal protest is proof that you’re a bad father — so you go to prison for child abuse, and she goes to the basement of some Gaetz-lookin’ dude who attends Party rallies every Sunday with his terrified wife.
Good luck finding right-wing professors, Ron. Alumni of the Florida Universities are going to be really mad when the schools can’t fund football and basketball in the coming years. They already have a recruiting crisis due to Ron’s actions.
If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
If conservatives become convinced that an education makes people less conservative, then they will not gaze inward to wonder why that might be, but instead reject education.
Education is teaching kids to think for themselves while giving them the ability to tell fact from bullshit.
Indoctrination is forcing your own ethics, morals, and beliefs onto children who lack the ability to discern fact from bullshit, usually early enough in their development to ensure that the bullshit you’ve forced onto them becomes permanently encoded into their brain structure.
Nobody’s indoctrinating college students. The students are being taught to critically analyze information and are using that critical analysis to realize that the worldview they’ve been spoon-fed is bullshit.
I think some confusion has happened since I made my last comment. I was under the impression that Education != indoctrination was saying that DeSantis wasn’t going after educators, but instead, getting rid of “indoctrination”.
I wholeheartedly agree that the major difference is that education teaches to question your world, and indoctrination tells you to shut up and get in line. What DeSantis is getting rid of is education, and making room for indoctrination.
Education is the act of imparting knowledge, usually with the goal of improving general understanding and critical thinking skills, while indoctrination carries inherent connotations of partisanship - usually about believing a specific doctrine or ideology, even if facts or evidence suggests it to be untrue.
At some level, education is about instilling certain ideas and theories within an audience for the purpose of driving some kind of social activity. Whether that activity is academic research or religious proselytization depends on the information being conveyed. But every form of education does require a certain set of axioms be taken at face value.
People tend to lose sight of the fundamental and necessary techniques used in imparting new knowledge while fixating on the relative values that the new knowledge provides when they toss out words like “indoctrination”.
Professor isn’t a title many on the right can achieve. A Education PhD, published research, and the clout in the education community play a role. The education community rarely produces any right wingers outside of the business related schools.
You do not need a teaching degree to be a professor.
Most universities are private institutions, and can employ whomever they see fit in whichever positions they seem appropriate. They have a vested interest in employing accredited individuals.
What I am saying is Florida will run out of such individuals at which time, it will become very easy for anyone to become a college professor.
Also, I have been a college professor, and I only have an undergrad. Not in teaching. It was my actual title.
And I am explaining that it is the case. Anyone who calls themselves a professor and doesn’t have a doctorate in their field is a hypocrite and a charlatan. I view them the same as a civilian pretending to be a military member or veteran. Sorry but you have to earn that title, not just give it to yourself.
Absolutely no shortage of right-wing academics and ideologues who would be happy to take an $80k/year stipend to tell their RAs to play PraegerU videos for an auditorium-sized classroom while they clumsily flirt with freshman co-eds in the back office.
Once you abandon the idea of education as a real thing that colleges are actually supposed to do, its basically just a no-show job that functions as a kick-back to your cronies.
But won’t that mean that everyone will just go to universities in other States? Isn’t the point here about a brain drain, not the complete loss of all population.
The people with no brains to drain will stay in Florida presumably.
But won’t that mean that everyone will just go to universities in other States?
That depends on how you value your college degrees. If degrees represent real useful career knowledge, then sure. But if they’re just tokens handed out to a social network, then why would I leave Florida U if I know an FU degree will land me a good job in a high-paying Florida business? If I’m just working the sales desk of a construction company or doing entry level accounting on my way to completing my CPA license or Real Estate License, who cares whether U. Miami or Florida State is a diploma mill?
The people with no brains to drain will stay in Florida presumably.
There are plenty of very good doctors that come out of Baylor and Brigham Young University, despite both campuses being notoriously far-right. You don’t need a liberal education to learn to code. You don’t need it to update actuarial tables at a big insurance company. You don’t need it to help run a multi-billion dollar media empire.
There is no shortage of good money in cultivating a large loyal contingent of right-wing academics, either. Certainly Milton Friedman and Karl Ichan and Charlie Munger did very well for themselves.
And where will the drained brains even go? It isn’t as though Silicon Valley or Wall Street are lacking for far-right ideological leaders. In the end, you’re still going to end up working at Exxon or Apple or FOX Media or Goldman Sachs, no matter how liberal your politics. Moving to California won’t save you from Peter Thiel or Ben Shapiro.
It’s not that having a right leaning political viewpoint will prevent you from learning higher skills it’s just that if businesses consider Florida to not be of high education quality then they won’t accept their diplomas.
Sure if I can just pay some money and then lie around doing nothing and get a degree that’s great, but only if the degree is actually valid outside of Florida. Otherwise I wanted a qualification that gives me options.
if businesses consider Florida to not be of high education quality then they won’t accept their diplomas.
The education that’s being targeted isn’t business school training or software development. DeSantis isn’t defunding the petroleum engineering department. This is all revolving around the liberal arts schools, effectively forcing out anyone with a history or english lit degree that doesn’t spend the weekends in white hoods.
In the US, you would get arrested or shot before meaningfully changing the symbol. In the Czech Republic, an artist group did just about that on the president’s residency and faced no charges.
That’s basically what the artist group did. They pretended to be construction workers on the scaffolding (including hard hats), turning the ❤ into a ❓by adding a lamp and covering the left half.
They also pretended to be electric repairmen, replacing pedestrian traffic light symbols with people in weird positions (peeing or tripping), and as roof tilers at Prague Castle again, replacing the 100-year-old presidential flag with a pair of giant red shorts to caricature our then-president’s pro-Russian views and shamelessness. Very cool and chaotic neutral, which I approve. (Username czechs out)
If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid. Interesting stuff in that wiki article and a ballsy move with the faked nuke video. That’s not something I’d want to have to defend in court, particularly if people think it’s real and injure themselves or others in a panic. Anyone seeking to follow in their footsteps should pay attention to the old advice: Czech yourself before you wreck yourself.
Unlike first world countries, our citizens never received training on how to act in case of nuclear blast. There are bunkers but few people know where they are and how to access one, and nobody has any in their backyard. We have sirens that officials could use to broadcast emergency messages and tell people what to do but they obviously weren’t activated. So the only thing that happened was several distressed old people calling the station.
Tbh the camera was asking to be hacked. Somehow they knew that its broadcast equipment was in an insufficiently secured building and the connection between the camera and transmitter was unencrypted, plain old PAL video. For the hack, they only needed to capture some normal video from the cam or film a nearby location, edit it, store it on a portable video player (they used a laptop with perhaps a video-out peripheral but most digital cameras from back then will do), gain entry to the facility, connect the player, and use a portable analog TV and ordered list of cycled-through locations in the Panorama program to press play at the right moment. About as technically advanced as something I could do if I had the balls, lol. Needless to say, all remote cameras were upgraded to digital soon after that.
Pretty cool, nice to know that it at least gave the people in charge a reason to make some upgrades. As for the panic thing, I was thinking more about the actions of those who would take it at face value and try to “settle some scores” or raid the local Wal-Mart supermarket before the next bombs fell on their heads. We’ve got a lot of people and there’s a percentage of the population who will choose to do the dumbest possible thing at the drop of a hat.
The artists did have the courtesy of including their URL at the bottom of the screen so people who knew about the Internet knew it was fake. Also if the sirens did not activate on their way to the supermarket (don’t say Walmart if you mean a general supermarket pls), they would reconsider. Anyway, not many people actually watch a program that is literally just mountain panoramas and weather information, the geopolitical situation was quite stable back then, and anyone with a bit of common sense would realize that the Giant Mountains would not be a prime target for any attack.
I went with Wal-Mart specifically to paint a picture of the faulty decision-making in the scenario, figured its infamy would still work internationally but I’ve edited the previous comment. Part of it was misremembering the setting of the 2004 “Dawn of the Dead” remake but that took place in a mall like the original. The past few years (and, to be honest, most of the ones before that) have shaken my confidence in the idea of common sense around here as well.
Why the downvotes? It’s true. It does not work all the time (taking down Elon’s “𝕏” is too daring) but you can avoid suspicion 90% of the time. That’s how I stole neodymium magnets from a public noticeboard using a reflective vest, a random timetable printout and a screwdriver. (They had switched to glued-on notices anyway so the magnets were left unused in a corner, and playing with magnets makes my inner kid happy.)
Somebody’s mad at me so they’ve been going through my profile and voting a bunch of comments down to zero / slightly negative (or as close as they can get with ~30 accounts).
The warrant also recounted how witnesses and co-workers informed investigators that the engineer had allegedly “sold radios and radio equipment, worked odd hours, was arrogant, frequently lied, displayed inappropriate workplace behavior and sexual harassment, had financial problems, and possessed [Arnold air force base land mobile radio] equipment”.
. . . Investigators also reported to have found evidence which indicated that the searched contractor had possible access to FBI communications, as well as Tennessee state agencies, Forbes reported. The FBI is working alongside the air force on the investigation, according to the outlet.
. . . The Forbes report comes only three months after one of the worst leaks in US intelligence in over a decade. In that case, 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, an air national guardsman at the time, was arrested on suspicion of leaking hundreds of Pentagon documents.
He has since been charged under the Espionage Act.
Destroying property is a no no in the states. Ironically if children were slaves (therefore property) we might actually get somewhere in having better laws protecting them from getting shot
The demolition is part of a national movement to return the natural flow of the nation’s rivers and restore habitat for fish and the ecosystems that sustain other wildlife. More than 2,000 dams have been removed in the U.S. as of February, with the bulk of those having come down within the last 25 years, according to the advocacy group American Rivers.
The removal of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River is the movement’s greatest triumph and its greatest challenge. When demolition is completed by the end of next year, more than 400 miles (644 kilometers) of river will have opened for threatened species of fish and other wildlife. By comparison, the 65 dams removed in the U.S. last year combined to reconnect 430 miles (692 kilometers) of river.
This is great to see and hopefully will restore the lost salmon runs.
Yeah there’s really no need for so many dams anymore, they were built to power hydroelectric stations that are no longer needed so this is a good thing.
“Why not just let nature take its course? Well, nature didn’t take its course when dams got put in. We can’t pretend this gigantic change in the landscape has not happened and we can’t just ignore the fact that invasive species are a big problem in the west and in California,” said Dave Meurer, director of community affairs for Resource Environmental Solutions, the company leading the restoration project. “Our goal is to give nature a head start.”
Which is another really good point, sadly there’s a lot of invasive plant species that were unknowingly brought over by Europeans mostly for ornamental purposes which have had a devastating effects on native plant life
No clue why he would think that. Hydro power is the best source of carbon-free power. It’s also the only reasonable way to do grid-scale storage we have. Unless we see a huge build-out in nuclear, hydro-power will be required for the next century.
Alternatives are being developed around the world, such as iron-air batteries
When your alternative is something that doesn’t exist yet, you are reinforcing my point that hydro is the only viable grid-scale storage tech we have right now.
I don’t think @LexiconDexicon said hydropower is no longer needed. They just said there’s no need for so many dams anymore, and I think that’s correct in this case.
A lot of these older and extremely underpowered dams were built in important riverways. They decimated salmon runs but produced only small amounts of power in return. For a recent example, Elwha Dam removal in Washington State comes to mind. It and another dam produced only 38% of the electricity needed to operate one sawmill, but it killed salmon habitats. You can read a little about it here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwha_Dam
What’s not well known is that dams also have a limited life – they silt up. They produce most hydro power when new, which declines as silt fills the dam, raising the bottom/lowering head.
There’s a great book I have somewhere, is it CADILLAC DESERT? about the big 20th century push to “tame nature” and dam every river to make it “produce”. Total folly.
It just seems like a huge waste of energy / resources to remove an existing dam than to remediate it somehow. I didn’t see any mention of if this generated power or how it’d be offset.
Not really an environmental win if this hydro power capacity was replaced by coal.
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